Thursday, December 27, 2012

Artificial Intelligence is the Key to Future Growth — Or Stagnation

Everybody is getting into the act.
I've no idea how this all plays out and I don't think anyone else has more than a guess. We'll see who the good guessers are.
Krugman's Monday post was interesting but more interesting were some of the commentariat, more later.

From Mother Jones:

A few days ago Tyler Cowen pointed me to an op-ed by Robert Gordon
suggesting that future economic growth will be fairly sluggish. Gordon
points out, correctly, that the strong growth of the 20th century was
based on two key inventions, electrification and the internal combustion
engine, and the thousands of innovations that followed on from those.
The computer revolution of the late 20th century just hasn't produced as
much innovation, and thus hasn't powered as much growth.
Fair enough, as far as it goes. But what about the future? Here's the nutshell version of Gordon's op-ed:

The first response from skeptics always involves health
care....[But] pharmaceutical research appears to be entering a phase of
diminishing returns....The fracking revolution and soaring oil and gas
production have also excited optimists. But this isn't a source of
future economic growth....Another claim by the growth optimists is that
3-D printing and micro-robots will revolutionize manufacturing....Can
economic growth be saved by Google's driverless car? This is bizarre
ground for optimism, but it is promoted not just by Google's Eric Schmidt but by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Erik Brynjolfsson.

This is very strange. Gordon may be right about all these things, but
he rather conspicuously left out the most important future innovation
of all: artificial intelligence. You simply can't write about the future
of innovation without talking about that. At the very least, you need
to acknowledge it, and then explain why you think it will never happen,
or why it won't produce a lot of future growth even if it does. But you
can't just ignore it and then say there are no grounds for being
optimistic about future growth. It would be like writing about the
future of sports in 1960 and not bothering to address the possibility
that television might have an impact on things....MORE